Experiments Without Control

Say that you are in the search engine business. And say that you have built a model that estimates how relevant an ad is based on the ‘context’: search query, previous few queries, kind of device, location, and such. Now let’s assume that for context X, the rank-ordered list of ads based on expected profit is: product A, product B, and product C. Now say that you want to estimate how effective an ad for product A is in driving the sales of product A. One conventional way to estimate this is to randomly assign during serve time: for context X, serve half the people an ad for product A and serve half the people no ad. But if it is true (and you can verify this) that an ad for product B doesn’t cause people to buy product A, then you can switch the ‘no ad’ control where you are not making any money with an ad for product B. With this, you can estimate the effectiveness of ad for product A while sacrificing the least amount of revenue. Better yet, if it is true that ad for product A doesn’t cause people to buy product B, you can also at the same time get an estimate of the efficacy of ad for product B.